Nintendo Switch firmware update 20.0.0 made load times for all my digital games worse

[RyanXx]

Ever since Nintendo Switch firmware update 20.0.0 from April last year (the update that added Virtual Game Cards to the Switch) load times for all my digital games became significantly worse. The only way I found to solve the issue was to re-download the games. The problem is that I have a large digital library on Switch, so every time now that I want to play a game in my digital library, I have to re-download the entire game unless I want a one minute load time for the game to start. Why is this happening? Doesn't seem like a coincidence that this started happening after a firmware update shortly before the Nintendo Switch 2 launched. Is Nintendo pushing firmware updates to their older systems to make performance worse? This seems like planned obsolescence nonsense straight out of Apple's playbook. Is anyone else having this issue too?

I am using a Nintendo Switch - OLED Model and it is not soft-modded with CFW.

 

[NinStar]

What SD card are you using? I used to have a similar issue with my SanDisk Ultra, read speeds for games I installed first would get slower and slower over time, while newly installed/re-downloaded games would have read speeds at the expected rate, I've seen a few reports of people having the exact same issue in the past (also with SanDisk Ultra cards).

 

[RyanXx]

What SD card are you using? I used to have a similar issue with my SanDisk Ultra, read speeds for games I installed first would get slower and slower over time, while newly installed/re-downloaded games would have read speeds at the expected rate, I've seen a few reports of people having the exact same issue in the past (also with SanDisk Ultra cards).

Yeah, it's a SanDisk Ultra 400GB. I only bought it around 2 years ago. It's weird that I started noticing the problem right after I updated to 20.0.0 though, I wonder it was the update that messed up the card. Does that mean that the SD card is done for and I need a replacement? The card is basically full, so it was still inevitable that I was going to need to buy a new card anyway. Any recommendations for good 1TB cards? If I buy another SanDisk one, will I have this problem again?

 

[johsam]

Does reinstalling a game fix the long loadtime for that game permanently?

I have a relativly new 512gb sandisk and have the same problem with longer load times after updating to fw 20.4. Havent tried reinstalling the games yet though.

***update***

I tried copying a game to my PC using DBI, deleted it and installed it again. The loading time is much shorter now.
In DBI the download speed was 5-6Mb/s when downloading it the first time. After removing it and reinstalling it the download speed using DBI is about 30MB/s.

Can anyone explain what is going on?

 

[RyanXx]

Does reinstalling a game fix the long loadtime for that game permanently?

I have a relativly new 512gb sandisk and have the same problem with longer load times after updating to fw 20.4. Havent tried reinstalling the games yet though.

For me, I think it's temporarily only. Might be wrong though.

 

[NinStar]

Yeah, it's a SanDisk Ultra 400GB. I only bought it around 2 years ago. It's weird that I started noticing the problem right after I updated to 20.0.0 though, I wonder it was the update that messed up the card. Does that mean that the SD card is done for and I need a replacement? The card is basically full, so it was still inevitable that I was going to need to buy a new card anyway. Any recommendations for good 1TB cards? If I buy another SanDisk one, will I have this problem again?

Yes, it is not a problem with the Switch, but rather with the SD card itself (if you use it in other devices, you'll notice the same pattern over time). Honestly I have no idea what the root cause is, I just know it is a problem that exists and that I and others have faced in the past.

I got a 1tb SanDisk Extreme (it was the most affordable option at the time, after the SanDisk Ultra and Lexar Play), it's been 3 years and I didn't have that issue happen to me ever since, my card is nearly full (28gb left) and games I downloaded a long time ago still have normal loading times.